AUSTRALIANS AT WAR

THE NEW AMERICAN CENTURY is a compelling factual history of neoconservatism and its influence on US Foreign Policy in the Middle East during the first decade of the twenty-first century. Click on image above for details.

Thursday, March 27, 2014

Over the last few
weeks the Israelis have been sending their strike aircraft at low levels over
the Gaza Strip launching missiles at various targets. As a result several
Palestinians have been killed.

The Israelis have
said that these raids are in retaliation to Palestinian rocket attacks against
Israel, but is this really the case?

B’Tselam, the
Israeli Information Centre for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories, reports
that on 28 February 2014, Amneh Qdeih, a 57-year-old mentally ill Palestinian
woman, wandered off from a wedding party in the village of Khuza’ah and walked
toward the border fence with Israel. As she wandered closer to the border fence
Israeli border guards opened fire on her and she was shot in the abdomen and
died. She was the fifth no-combatant Palestinian to be killed by Israeli border
guards while more than 50 other non-combatant Palestinians have been injured
within the previous three months.

As a result of
this upsurge in attacks against Palestinians, Palestinian fighters have
retaliated by launching rocket attacks against Israel. Israel, in turn, have
then launched air strikes against targets in the Gaza which killed
at least eight Palestinians on 27 February 2014 and a further three
Palestinians were killed in another Israeli air strike on the Gaza on 11
March 2014.

It is clear that
Israel by killing Palestinian non-combatants in the Gaza Strip are deliberately
trying to provoke Palestinian fighters into retaliating by firing rockets into
Israel so that Israel can then attack targets in the Gaza in the hope that they
further provoke the Palestinians to fire more rockets into Israel. The intent
is clear; Israel is preparing to launch yet another major incursion into the
Gaza Strip. However, they can only justify this after the Palestinians have
increased the number of rocket attacks against Israel.

If and when the
Israelis do unleash a full onslaught against the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip
it is likely this time to be a full-on invasion and occupation if they can get
the Palestinians to escalate to that point.

Naturally, the
full force of the Israeli propaganda machine around the world will be there to
push the Israeli Hasbara that covers
up the Israeli aggression that triggers Palestinian rocket attacks against
Israel.

So far the
Israelis have been thwarted in their attempts to provoke the Palestinians of
the Gaza Strip into all-out war but one can rest assured that it won’t stop the
Israelis from continuing with their efforts.

Monday, March 17, 2014

In an
article today at Commentary online,
senior neoconservative writer Michael Rubin attempts to perpetuate the lie that
the US was given false intelligence about Saddam Hussein’s WMDs. Rubin writes:

The narrative of “Bush lied, people died,” is nonsense of course. The
problem was that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein bluffed his own generals and
aides. When Americans tapped into their phone calls, they heard Saddam’s
lieutenants discussing such weapons as if they had them, and when American
spies debriefed their Iraqi counterparts, there was no sign of deception
because many of the defectors believed the information they conveyed.

Ignored here is
the intelligence of the one defector that really knew all about Saddam’s WMDs –
because he helped build them up and then later destroyed them after the end of
the First Gulf War.

In August 1995
Hussein Kamel, Saddam’s son-in-law and Minister of Military Industries,
defected to Jordan. There he was debriefed by UNSCOM. At his debriefing Kamel
told his interrogators all about Saddam’s WMDs. In the run up to the war
against Iraq in 2003, the US and their main allies, Tony Blair and John Howard,
relied on this information to build their case for war. However, while the list
of WMDs that Saddam had was revealed, what the public were not told was that
Kamel, in the same debriefing, had had also said that all of these weapons had
been destroyed and that he had personally overseen their destruction. The
transcript of that debriefing can be found here.

Rubin then goes on
to write:

Nevertheless, critics of the Iraq war are absolutely correct to say that
the fact that the intelligence turned out to be wrong undercut American
credibility on the world stage. The next time some future Colin Powell goes
before the United Nations to reveal a case for war or for anything else
utilizing American intelligence, conspiracy theorists will have a field day.

The fact is; the
intelligence did not ‘turn out to be wrong’ but, rather, it was abused and
twisted by Bush, Blair and Howard in order to support their push for war. Bush,
Blair and Howard were all familiar with Kamel’s debriefing, indeed, Howard referred
to it directly in his speech
to parliament on 4 February 2003. Ignored by all three leaders was the part
of the same debriefing document in which Kamel had said that all of the stockpiles
of WMDs had been destroyed.

The next time
America or any other Western nation tries to go war based on so-called ‘intelligence’
it won’t be just ‘conspiracy theorists’ that will have a field day; it’ll be
people who are armed with the facts about how world leaders are prepared to use
deceit and lies in order to destroy other people’s countries.

Thursday, March 13, 2014

Jonathan Tobin, a neoconservative propagandist with Commentary online magazine, has written a piece today that attempts to perpetuate the neocon myth that the Gaza Strip is a Palestinian State on account of it being run by Hamas. In his relentless tirade against there ever being a true Palestinian state, Tobin writes:

…the theoretical arguments about a Palestinian state tend to ignore the fact that one currently exists in all but name in Gaza. There, a Hamas government continues its tyrannical Islamist rule over more than a million people with no interference from Israel other than the imposition of a loose blockade on the strip (food, medicine, and other essential items enter it daily from Israel).

“…no interference from Israel other than the imposition of a loose blockade on the strip”?

Using helicopters to place Special Forces on boats trying to reach the Strip and killing many of its passengers is hardly a “loose blockade” and, while food, medicine and other essential items do, indeed, enter daily from Israel, it is firstly, nowhere enough and secondly, ignores the fact that Israel is interfering with the people of the Gaza Strip’s right to trade with whoever they wish to trade with.

Israel also interferes with Hamas and the running of the Gaza Strip in other ways. Israel has tight patrols around the Gaza’s entire fence that continually harass the Palestinian farmers who tend their fields close to the border. These farmers have been shot at and wounded or killed by Israeli soldiers on almost a daily basis. These provocations are rarely mentioned by the mainstream media but the Israelis and their neocon supporters in the West are very quick to condemn the Palestinian fighters when they retaliate in the only way they are able to by firing rockets into Israel in an attempt to deter further Israel aggression against the Gaza people. The Israelis then use the rocket attacks as an excuse to launch massive and deadly air attacks against the Gaza Strip.

Tobin goes on to write:

But as today’s barrage of missile fire aimed at southern Israel from Gaza shows, this Palestinian state presents a clear and present danger to both the Jewish state and regional stability. While no casualties resulted from the 50 rockets fired from Gaza, the incident not only terrorized southern Israel. It also demonstrated the inherent danger that an irredentist Palestinian state where armed terrorists are free to plan mayhem poses to Israel’s security. While peace activists claim all problems will be solved by Israeli territorial withdrawals, the example of Gaza, where every single settlement, soldier, and individual Jew was pulled out in 2005, continues to operate as a powerful argument against repeating the experiment in the West Bank as much of the world insists Israel must do.

Here Tobin pushes the lie about the Gaza Strip being a Palestinian state further.

The Gaza Strip represents only a small proportion of what one day will be a Palestinian State. Just because ‘every single settlement, soldier and individual Jew was pulled out in 2001’ doesn’t make the Gaza Strip a Palestinian state. A Palestinian state includes all of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip in its entirety as one homogenous entity. It is to this end that the Palestinian people in the Gaza are continuing to fight for. The fight’s not over until all of the Palestinian state is united as one – and that won’t be until ‘every single settlement, soldier and individual Jew’ has pulled out of all of the West Bank as well as the Gaza Strip. Until then, Palestinians in both the Gaza Strip and the West Bank have the right to at least defend themselves against Israeli harassment and aggression and to continue to fight for the liberation of their nation

Monday, March 10, 2014

Several news sources are suggesting that troops from the US based mercenary company Academi, previously known as Blackwater and then Xe, have arrived by air at Kiev airport and have been deployed to eastern and southern Ukraine districts where the local populations are Russian speaking and generally more aligned to Russian influence than the Ukrainian tendency to align with the West.

The move follows the Russian’s deployment of what, according to the Daily Beast, seem to be mercenary troops from Russia’s own equivalent of America’s Academi mercenary outfit, a group called ‘Vnevedomstvenaya Okhrana’, who are currently deployed in Crimea ostensibly to protect Russian bases there and the Russian speaking people in the Crimea who align with Russia.

While diplomatic activity hopefully will diffuse the stand-off, the two opposing mercenary groups are consolidating their positions on the ground. Meanwhile, Russian regular troops are moving to the west of Russia and are engaged in various military exercises. As the US sends warnings against such ‘provocative’ exercises, neocon warhawks in America insist that the US move troops and airpower into former Warsaw Pact nations in east Europe and even post nuclear weapons to these now NATO nations.

On the diplomatic front, sanctions are being talked about. The big problem with sanctions, however, is that they are likely to hurt the West as much as it does Russia. Currently, Russia provides Europe with around a quarter of its gas, most of it via the Ukraine. Trade worth billions of dollars to both sides would be seriously disrupted. Sanctions in the long term could well be detrimental to Russia if Russia did not have anyone else to turn to. Sanctions though are only likely to push Russia even closer to China, and China, in turn, could make economic life in the West very difficult if it so chose to do in support of Russia.

At this stage, both sides are sabre-rattling with little likelihood of anything more than each side taking pot shots at each other. While this in itself can be dangerous and lead quickly to escalation, both sides realise that a full on hot war between Russia and the US is out of thee question. Both sides sending mercenaries to the region that may come to blows with each other may well be the extent of any further violence in the region.

Saturday, March 01, 2014

Yesterday I wrote about how Australians had surrendered their compassion with regard to boatpeople. I showed how they had become convinced by the rhetoric and propaganda of the right-wing of the commentariat and the right-wing of both major political parties that stopping the boats was imperative in order to ‘stop the drownings’ of refugees seeking asylum in Australia by boat. I showed how the ‘stop the drownings’ meme had become a useful catchcry to cover for the real reason for many Australians not wanting to allow non-European non-white foreigners into Australia and that racism was the unspoken real reason behind Australia’s attitude toward boatpeople.

I suggested that by the simple expediency of providing seaworthy boats to those seeking refuge or even just flying them in would solve the problem of deaths at sea. I suggested that quick and efficient on-shore processing based on humanitarian principles would extinguish the angst refugees currently are force to endure during detention prior to processing.

Today, Dr. Gordon Menzies of the University of Technology in Sydney in an op-ed piece in ABC News Online perpetuates the nonsensical myth of the government’s policies being for the boatpeople’s own good. He writes:

The driving force of the current policy regarding refugees emerges directly from consequentialism: tough treatment now will deter future arrivals down the track.

It is important to realise, too, that this line of thought can be compassionate, which is why it has penetrated some notably left-leaning political minds. Stopping people from risking their lives is surely a compassionate goal?

In reality, no self-respecting ‘left-leaning political mind’ would be falling into that trap.

Menzies also demonstrates the point about how the lies embedded in the rhetoric and propaganda of the right-wing about boatpeople have become entrenched in the psyche of many an Australian voter. Menzies writes:

It has taken a while, but it now appears that both the major parties, and a good deal of their support base, have reached agreement in principle on a tough stance towards boat people. The majority of voters, assailed by the twin fears of terrorism and the "wrong kind of person" entering the country, are broadly supportive of a "whatever it takes" approach to dissuading asylum seekers from coming to our shores.

The ‘fear of terrorism’ and ‘the wrong kind of person’ notions were both introduced into the boatpeople narrative by the extreme right-wing commentariat. While the ‘wrong kind of person’ rhetoric transparently attempts to disguise outright racism, ‘the fear of terrorism’ idea is not supported by any actual evidence.

Menzies avoids asking the unasked question: Why do we want to stop asylum seekers arriving here by boat? He parrots the same old line about wanting to ‘stop the drownings’. But we know this is nonsense because there have always been Australians who have wanted to stop boatpeople coming to Australia even before any of them actually drowned and, besides, as I’ve already mentioned, the problem of stopping the drownings is very easily solved without having to send thousands off to places they don’t want to be housed in concentration camp-like conditions for indefinite periods of time and without any certainty of their future and where they still risk life and limb anyway.

The tone of Dr. Menzies piece is vague and the reader is left wondering if he’s just being cynical about government policies by parodying the right-wing view about boatpeople or if his words reflect his own thinking about the issue. Either way, he’s been unable to face the real test that determines an individual’s stance on the subject; he’s failed to face the reality of Australia’s racism and, in doing so, has conceded his own racism by virtue of perpetuating the myths about boatpeople.

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About Me

is an Aeronautical Engineer, Historian and general carer of what goes on in the world.
Apart from an earlier career in engineering, Lataan also has a First Class Honours BA degree in History and a PhD in International Politics.
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